Sunday, July 31, 2005

Shock and horror

LoTekK.com

*groan*I'm apparently getting too old for this getting-home-drunk-at-6-in-the-morning bullshit.

The main bits of LoTekK.com are up. Still need to get some more pictures up, but yeah, the main bits are there. Gallery code works nicely, though I'd like to automate the thumbnailing and indexing process. For the time being I create the thumbs manually, and the indexing is done via updating a .csv file. Better than no automation at all, but still. The other sections are content-free at the moment, though I've got some links up on the Links page.

Uh, anyone know how to get mousewheel scrolling working on scrollable divs in Firefox?

I haven't managed to test the site out on Opera yet, since I don't have it installed on this computer, so if someone running Opera could take a look and let me know if it's kosher, that would be great. I haven't fixed up the vertical alignment issue in the galleries in IE yet; that'll hopefully come sometime this week. That's the only IE issue that I've noticed so far. It's gold in Firefox, though.

Update: Went ahead and installed Opera anyways. Works perfectly, including the vertical alignment in the galleries.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

IE7 revisited

This may actually be the quickest retraction I will ever make in my life. Red Dalek has thoughtfully pointed me to another announcement on the IEBlog listing fixes to, among other things, everything that was ever broken about IE's CSS compliance. Mind you, I'm taking this news with a fair handful of salt, being that we've gone from getting PNG alpha, to full CSS 2.0 compliance, in the space of a day. But I'll reserve judgement until the next beta release. Who knows, maybe we can all finally stop worrying about layout hacks. :)

Congratulations Microsoft...

...You've given yet another burgeoning web developer the motivation to gouge out his own kneecaps with a spoon ("...because it's dull, you twit; it'll hurt more." God bless you Alan Rickman). IE never ceases to amaze me with its blatant disregard of web standards set forth by the W3C, in particular of CSS. As any aspiring web developer/designer can tell you, working with CSS in IE requires an inane amount of workarounds, "fixes," and hair-pulling. God bless Firefox.

Now we have IE7, or rather an early beta. Mind you, it's a closed MSDN release, instead of the promised public beta. I haven't been able to get my hands on it just yet, but it appears that, surprise surprise, its CSS compliance is still shot to hell. You've had four years since IE6, Microsoft. FOUR YEARS. Four years of complaints about non-compliance with web standards. Four years of bitching and moaning. Well, IE7 gives us proper PNG alpha support, I'll give you that. But... FOUR FUCKING YEARS. I long for the day Firefox finally catches up to, nay, overtakes, IE.

"Our goal is to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality (performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g. additional standards support beyond what’s in beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release Beta 2 much more broadly."-Dean, in the IE7b1 release announcement

Again I stress: FOUR YEARS. You'll pardon me if that sounds like a horseshit attempt to appease developers while they sit on their collective asses and twiddle their thumbs. Arrogant fucks.

That said, I should have my portfolio site up by sometime tomorrow. The layout is pretty much done, aside from an image-alignment issue with IE (shock and horror), and a good chunk of the PHP is done. I've managed to get by without MySQL, and to be honest, I don't know that I'll need it just yet, given the size of the site. Thankfully it shouldn't be too much of a headache to rewrite the required sections of code to accommodate that should the time come.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Caged lab rat

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Portfolio site. And about damned time, too. Well, sorta.

I've got me an interface and a splash for my in-construction portfolio site. And by interface, I mean a graphical mockup. Still needs some clean up and love, but I reckon it'll work. Now it's onto the boring part: code. Yet another reason to switch over to Dreamhost: free MySQL. Anyways, time to look at pretty pictures (click on the thumbnails for a full-size).

Your-site suckness (aka same old shit), and PHP on a USB Flash Drive

So your-site seems to have had some kind of catastrophic meltdown, or something, since I haven't been able to access any your-site hosted pages for the last 4 hours. Including their company page. o_O I seriously should get around to switching to Dreamhost. Like I've been saying for months now. Hopefully your-site comes back up soon enough, so I can at least grab a bunch of files that I don't have backups of. Grr. (If my avatar and the FireFox images show up by the time you read this, then those idiots are back up)

On a lighter note, I was checking out firepages, and they have a quick writeup on how to get a PHP site served off of a USB Flash Drive (Apache and MySQL backend). I can't even begin to describe how cool (and useful) this can be.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

On random swastika sightings

Dinner, booze, and shopping, not necessarily at the same time

So I met up with a friend for dinner last night, which was fun. Did a lot of catching up. Another friend was supposed to meet up with me for drinks after, but JP Morgan got caught up in a shitstorm when China revalued the yuan, so he got stuck working late. So the two of us finished up dinner, headed over to the riverfront, and drunk ourselves into a stupor over a $100 bottle of wine, her treat. More catching up and burnt lungs followed. All in all, a pretty good night.

Today, I went off and did some window shopping at the main computer hub here in Singapore, where the more-or-less tech-savvy go to shop, haggle, and buy computer hardware and software. Kinda fell in love with the new HP Tablet PC, the Presario TC4200. Nice screen (didn't notice any color shifting weirdness even at extreme angles), fairly light, comes with an external Combodrive, Centrino 1.73ghz, half a gig of RAM, built-in Bluetooth, S-Video out, built-in SD reader. From some reviews, it can apparently hold a charge for about 4-5 hours, which is ridiculous. It's got an Intel GPU, which wasn't so hot, but it's the cheapest thing on the market, even with the relatively hefty specs. Might have to think about this one.

Anyways, Sim Lim Square, this much-ballyhooed computer shopping center, is a veritable treasure trove of electronics bargains. Four storeys of stores dedicated to computer hardware and software, and another three storeys of mixed electronics (including more computer stuff). Mind you, every one of these stores is competing with each other. Bargain city, baby. Fantastic service if you sound like an expat, to boot. I'll update this post with interesting pics when I can. I think I'll be picking up a USB Bluetooth dongle tomorrow. For S$25 (that's about US$15 for you guys).

Speaking of which. This place has such a ridiculous variety of stuff that you'll find things you've been looking for for ages, and even things you never knew you needed. Like a USB-powered vaccuum cleaner for your computer. No, I'm not kidding. I think I may just pick one of those up as well.

In unrelated news, mobile data plans here suck dogballs. And I thought Sprint was bad. S$105/month (US$65-ish) for unlimited data usage, and that's JUST for the data. Grr. The next in line is $10 for about 4MB per month, and $0.032 per kb thereafter. Yech.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Back in Singapore

So it's been just over 5 years that I've been back in my home country, and to be honest, it doesn't feel all that strange. Oh, sure, stuff's changed, building's have gone down and new ones have come up, but really, it's the same place I left. I got in this morning, local time (GMT+8, so 12 hours ahead of y'all in the DC area), at about 1.45am, an hour behind schedule. I don't plan on flying Northwest again, if I can help it. On a slightly tangential note, I couldn't help but think of the old NWA (Niggaz With Attitudes) each time I saw the Northwest logo.

Anyways, I wanted to thank everyone again who made it to the apartment for that shindig, where many people got to see me drunk for the first time. Not as shitfaced as I used to get, but pretty drunk nonetheless. Thanks for the gifts, the booze, and most importantly, the company. Had a jolly good time, as it were.

The blog's going to be hosted here until I manage to get a decent setup on this computer (or I get a new computer altogether, whichever comes first), after which I'll see about getting a custom blog up. There won't be many photos on display for now, either, since I stupidly left my hotsync cable for my Treo hooked up to the computer in DC. o_O Photos as soon as I can get them off my Treo.